A Noise Downstairs(32)

“I understand that you’re—”

“You understand? That’s encouraging. My father and I came this close to getting killed.”

“I don’t believe that’s the case. The members of that team are very professional.”

Anna took a second to compose herself, to go in another direction. “Have you arrested him?”

“Mr. Hitchens, you mean.”

“Who else would I mean?”

“We have interviewed him, yes.”

Anna eyed him warily. “And?”

“We’ve interviewed him and we are investigating,” he said. “We believe the 9-1-1 call was placed from a cell phone, a kind of throwaway one they call a burner that—”

“I know what a burner is. I watch TV.”

“We’re going to try and find out where that burner was purchased, then see if we can determine who the buyer was.”

“He didn’t have the phone on him? Did you search him?”

“As I said, we are investigating,” Arnwright said.

“What did the caller sound like? The one who called 9-1-1?”

“It sounded like an elderly man. But there are all sorts of voice changer apps out there. Did Mr. Hitchens ever threaten to do something like this to you? A crank call of this nature.”

“No. But it’s his style. My father’s suffering from dementia. Hitchens would just love to scare a confused, old man.”

“We need a little more than that,” Arnwright said.

Anna sighed. “I think he might have killed a dog, too.”

Arnwright, pen in hand, looked ready to take down details. “Go on.”

She bit her lip. “I can’t . . . I don’t have any proof of anything.”

Arnwright put the pen away and stood. “Again, I’m sorry about what happened here. I’ll let you know if there are any developments.”

Anna showed him to the door. She went into the kitchen to see how her father was, but he was not there.

“Dad?” she called out.

She went upstairs to his room, expecting to find him on his rowing machine. But he wasn’t there either.

She thought she heard a muted whack.

Anna went to her father’s bedroom window, which looked out onto the backyard. There he was, golf club in hand—it looked like a driver—swinging at half a dozen balls he had dropped onto the well-manicured lawn, except for those spots where he had done some serious divots.

It was him, she told herself. I know it was him.





Eighteen

Paul was ready to begin.

He’d typed up plenty of notes, copied and pasted paragraphs from online news accounts of the double murder, but now he was ready to take that leap. To write the first sentence of whatever it was he was going to write. Memoir? Novel? A true-crime story? Who knew?

What Paul did know was that however the story came together, one thing was certain: it was his story.

And so he typed his first sentence:


Kenneth Hoffman was my friend.

Paul looked at the five words on his laptop screen. He hit the ENTER key to bring the cursor down a line. And he wrote: Kenneth Hoffman tried to murder me.

That seemed as good a place to start as any. From that springboard, he jumped straight into the story of that night. How, while returning from a student theatrical presentation at West Haven, he’d spotted Hoffman’s Volvo station wagon driving erratically down the Post Road.

About a thousand words in, Paul started finding the process therapeutic. The words flowed from his fingertips as quickly as he could type them. At one point he glanced at the bulky Underwood beside the laptop and said, “Like to see you crank out this shit this fast.”

When he got to the part where he saw the two dead women in the back of Kenneth’s car, Paul paused only briefly, took a deep mental breath, and kept on writing. He took himself to the point where the shovel crashed into his skull.

And then he stopped.

He felt simultaneously drained and elated. He had done it. He had jumped into the deep end of the cold pool, gotten used to it, and kept on swimming.

When Charlotte got home that evening, he could not wait to tell her about his progress.

“That’s fantastic,” she said. “I’m proud of you. I really am.” She paused. “Can I read it?”

“Not yet. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to be. When I feel it’s coming together, I’ll show it to you.”

She almost looked relieved. She’d had a long day that had finished with an evening showing, and all she wanted to do was go to bed. As she did most nights, she fell asleep moments after her head hit the pillow. She rarely snored—Paul knew he could not make the same claim—but he could tell when she was asleep by the deepness of her breathing.

He turned off the light at half past ten but lay awake, he was sure, for at least an hour, maybe two.

Paul felt wired.

For the first time since the attack, Paul felt . . . excited. If he’d ever doubted the wisdom of tackling this whole Hoffman thing head-on, he didn’t anymore. But would this change in attitude manifest itself in different ways? Would writing about Hoffman have an exorcising effect? Would the nightmares stop? Maybe not all at once, but at least gradually?

If the writing continued to go well—Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, it’s only Day One— then maybe it would be fun to do it in another location. After all, he could take his laptop anywhere. And he was not thinking about the closest Starbucks. More like Cape Cod.